Category World News

In order to deport Venezuelans as part of its immigration crackdown, a federal appeals court has found that Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully invoked a wartime law.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was cited by Trump’s use of it to expedite deportations without a fair trial on Tuesday by a majority of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

On several fronts, the choice was remarkable. Trump’s use of the 18th-century law was the first time a federal appellate court had evaluated the use of it, and it also served as a staunch condemnation of his mass deportation campaign from a court known for leaning conservative.

Judge Leslie Southwick refuted Trump’s claim that Tren de Aragua, a member of the Venezuelan gang, was a US invasion, in writing for the three-person bench.

According to Southwick, “we draw the conclusion that the findings do not support the existence of a predatory invasion or incursion.”

Therefore, we believe that petitioners’ arguments are likely to support the improper use of the AEA [Alien Enemies Act] by the petitioners.

The government is only permitted to detain and deport citizens of “hostile” foreign nations when they are at war or when they are “invasion or predatory incursions” under the Alien Enemies Act.

The law had only been used three times, and only once during war, prior to Trump. However, Trump administration officials have cited the law as a justification for the swift deportation of Venezuelan nationals because they constitute a criminal “invasion” across the border.

That claim was refuted by Southwick, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush.

There is no evidence that the mass immigration was caused by an armed, organized force, or by any other organization, according to Southwick.

The panel’s decision regarding Trump’s deportations has been made by the highest federal court so far. The US Supreme Court is expected to hear the case eventually.

However, the appeals court’s decision on Tuesday had a narrower scope: it only applies to Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but it may also be used as precedent in other appeals court circuits.

On March 15, Trump first invoked the Alien Enemies Act by publishing an executive order accusing the Tren de Aragua gang of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” into the US.

The Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), a maximum-security facility known for human rights violations, was visited by his administration on the same day.

Despite a lower judge’s request to forbid his use of the law while the flights were afoot, that transpired.

Although their lawyers claim that many of the Venezuelan migrants on those flights had no criminal records, Trump officials claimed that the Venezuelans were Tren de Aragua members.

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a long-time adversary of the Republican leader, controls Tren de Aragua in order to meet the requirements for using the Alien Enemies Act.

In a coordinated effort to destabilize the US, Trump has accused Maduro of being the mastermind of a “narco-terrorism enterprise.” However, a declassified US intelligence memo refutes this assertion, claiming that Maduro and Tren de Aragua had no connection to each other.

All 11 alleged Tren de Aragua members were killed when the US attacked a boat in international Caribbean waters on Tuesday, according to the US statement. Trump referred to them as “narcoterrorists.”

The US Supreme Court has twice heard cases involving Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, but it has not yet determined whether the Trump administration’s actions are legitimate.

The Supreme Court ruled in April that immigrants should still be able to file for deportations under the law, but that they should still have “reasonable time” to file objections.

Additionally, it recommended that courts elsewhere in the country address these disputes rather than the federal ones where the deportees are being held.

In a second decision, which was made in April, the Supreme Court halted a group of Venezuelan men’s deportations from northern Texas.

The Supreme Court then extended the block in May, criticizing the Trump administration for attempting to remove detainees quickly just one day after issuing deportation notices.

The majority of the opinion was clear: “Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights,” “seen as a muster.”

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was ultimately given the go-ahead for the case.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Lee Gelernt called the decision a “critically important decision reining in the administration’s view that it can simply declare an emergency without any oversight by the courts” in a statement released following the decision on Tuesday.

The Venezuelan men were represented by the ACLU.

However, one judge, a Trump appointee named Andrew Oldham, dissented from the Fifth Circuit Court decision on Tuesday.

According to Oldham, the president has the right to decide whether the necessary conditions were met in terms of the Alien Enemies Act’s deportations and that they are “matters of political judgment.”

A Palestine Action supporter was allegedly present at a Zoom meeting to protest the government’s designation of the group as a “terrorist” organization, according to UK police.

The US stock market has been performing exceptionally well, many investors assuming it is overpriced.

The benchmark S&amp, P 500 has increased by more than 60% since early 2023, surpassing all previous highs, despite concerns about US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) overhype.

The explosive growth has a price for investors: according to some, US stocks are now more expensive than ever.

According to GuruFocus, the highest price-to-sales ratio on record, an investor buying into the S&amp, P 500 last week had to pay over $3.25 for every $1 in revenue generated by its 500 constituent firms.

The benchmark index is still trading at more than 22 times forward earnings, which is significantly higher than the historical average, even though US stocks appear less expensive in relation to company profits forecasts.

Nine out of ten fund managers surveyed by Bank of America said they thought US stocks were overvalued in a poll conducted last month.

Some analysts have drawn comparisons to the late 1990s dotcom bubble due to the market’s sky-high market value.

Shares of the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose by about 80% before losing almost all of their gains between 2000 and 2022 as a result of the excitement surrounding the growth of the Internet.

No one is certain what a stock really is worth, according to James Angel, a McDonough School of Business expert on financial markets at Georgetown University.

Only God is able to predict the future. Stock prices have always been and will always be very volatile as a result of this uncertainty. A small change in the market’s general consensus forecast of future performance can cause a significant and unexpected decline in value.

Investors are not renouncing their reservations about the value of US stocks, despite the fact that they are becoming more and more concerned about the price of the stocks.

The S&amp, P 500, which is on track to comfortably surpass its average annual return in 2025, reached five all-time highs in August alone and is now up about 10% this year.

Analysts have provided a number of explanations for the market’s untamed ascent, including the remarkable profitability of the “Magnificent Seven”: Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet, as well as the still untapped potential of AI.

Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, noted that “earnings at US companies have held up surprisingly well and continue to grow.”

“AI may have increased the value of a few of the major tech companies and those who create AI architecture,” Damodaran continued, but it cannot explain the market’s overall rise.

Some investors have been concerned about the “Magnificent Seven,” who make up about one-third of the S&amp, P 500, but such concentration is not unprecedented.

The market dynamics of a few companies can be traced back to the late 18th century, according to Robert E. Wright, a lecturer in the Department of Economics at Central Michigan University.

According to Wright, “property insurers were the most important technology at the time,” followed by banks.

“Later, textile mills and other companies were established, railroads and, inevitably, automobiles. The measurement of capitalization is different, so we can’t be too precise, but the pattern seems to be the same: innovations lead to success, investment, and more success until commodification. The cycle then starts over in a different field.

Herd behavior

The market’s stellar performance, as well as the recent shift away from actively managed mutual funds to passive index funds, have prosaic explanations been provided.

More people are buying stocks now than ever thanks to the increased popularity of funds that monitor the&nbsp, S&amp, P500, and other broad market measures.

Human psychology, however, could be a bigger factor than any other economic indicator.

Herd behavior, according to Stephen Thomas, a professor at the UK’s Bayes Business School, is more accurate for explaining stock market movements than business performance or the state of the economy.

The only proven investment strategy with both historical support and cross-account support is “momentum,” which means that what goes up continues to rise until it doesn’t, according to Thomas.

According to Thomas, “Fund managers can’t afford to fall behind their competitors.”

“And these are using momentum either secretly or deliberately. They behave therefore in a rational manner in terms of firm behavior and, in fact, in terms of our understanding of investment strategies.

Steep falls

A stock market crash cannot be accurately predicted.

However, the market frequently exhibits steep falls.

The market has fallen 20 percent or more from its peak 15 times since World War II’s end.

In the majority of those cases, the market recovered to its peak within a few years, but the worst crashes kept investors in the red for a long time.

For nearly 13 years, investors who were hit by the dot-com bust and the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 struggled to fully recover their losses.

However, if there is one thing that practically everyone agrees on, it is that trying to time the market.

According to Angel, “waiting to see a trend is so dangerous is the result of some of the best uptrends occurring soon after the worst downtrends occur.”

1933, when the Great Depression was at the height of the stock market, was the “best year in US stock market history.” When it became clear that a recovery was in progress, the market quickly rallied because the market had already fallen so much.

Investors who feel they are within their risk tolerance, according to Burton Malkiel, a professor of economics at Princeton University, should shift the balance of their portfolios towards lower-risk assets, such as bonds, and hold onto more cash rather than attempt to time the market.

At a military parade in Bejing, China unveiled a new generation of weapons, including “robot wolves,” unmanned submarines and aircraft, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Alex Gatopoulos from Al Jazeera examines how all of these fit into Beijing’s effort to develop a world-class military.

Apparently, Israeli forces reportedly set off incendiary bombs by using quadcopter drones to incinerate ambulances outside of a Gaza City clinic. International humanitarian law forbids the use of incendiary weapons in densely populated areas.

President Donald Trump has released a video showing a United States military strike on a boat in the Caribbean that he says was smuggling drugs out of Venezuela for the Tren de Aragua gang, stoking fears of a possible clash between the Venezuelan and US militaries.

In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump said 11 people were killed on Tuesday. He wrote: “No US Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”

The strike, apparently carried out in international waters, marks an escalation in tensions between the Trump administration and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom Trump has repeatedly accused of assisting international drug gangs.

The incident is the first known attack the US has made against alleged smugglers since the Trump administration began increasing its military presence in the Caribbean last month to counter drug cartels designated as “narcoterrorist organisations”.

What happened?

The Trump administration dispatched warships to the southern Caribbean in August in a bid, it said, to counter threats to US national security posed by criminal organisations operating in the region.

The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that the US considers “terrorist organisations”.

On Thursday, the Reuters news agency reported that seven US warships and one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine were headed for the Caribbean. More than 4,500 sailors and Marines are on board the vessels.

Then on Tuesday, Trump announced the strike on the Venezuelan boat he said was transporting drugs.

What is Tren de Aragua and why does Trump link it to Maduro?

Trump identified the people on board the Venezuelan boat as “narcoterrorists” who were “at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States”.

The Tren de Aragua is one of Venezuela’s most notorious criminal organisations with operations spreading across Latin America.

Originating in the early 2000s among prison inmates in the state of Aragua, the gang initially controlled contraband and extortion networks inside jails before expanding outwards.

Today, it runs a diversified criminal empire spanning drug trafficking, human smuggling, extortion, illegal mining and contract killings.

The group is especially active along migration routes, exploiting vulnerable refugees and migrants through kidnapping, forced labour and sex trafficking.

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed there is a direct link between groups like Tren de Aragua and Venezuela’s government. According to Trump, Maduro controls the gang as part of a “narcoterrorism” ploy to destabilise the US.

On August 7, the US Departments of State and Justice doubled their reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro to $50m, accusing him of being “one of the largest narcotraffickers in the world”.

For his part, Maduro denies any connection to the group. At least two reports from the US intelligence community also contradict the Trump administration’s claim.

In May, a declassified National Intelligence Council report found that Maduro’s government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with” Tren de Aragua.

The report also said Maduro is “not directing” the gang’s operations in the US although it did concede that Venezuela offers a “permissive environment” that allows Tren de Aragua to operate.

What does the US strike mean for Venezuela-US relations?

The US deployment piqued concerns over spiralling tensions with Venezuela after Maduro urged millions of Venezuelans in August to join nationalist “militias” to defend Venezuela in response to Washington’s aggressive new antidrug operations in the Caribbean.

In the run-up to the US strike on the Venezuelan boat this week, Maduro said on August 25: “No empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela.”

The Venezuelan president has long accused the US government of interfering in his country’s politics on behalf of the political opposition. In last week’s remarks, he also accused Trump of “seeking a regime change through military threat”.

Trump, meanwhile, has adopted the same “maximum pressure” campaign that defined his foreign policy towards Venezuela during his first term. It included heightened sanctions on the Latin American country.

In spite of this, the US energy group Chevron returned to Venezuela in July after a three-month hiatus after Trump’s decision in February to rescind a US Treasury licence that allowed the oil giant to export crude from Venezuela despite US sanctions.

Trump revoked the existing licence, which was issued during President Joe Biden’s administration in 2022, over what he saw as a “failure” by Maduro to implement electoral reforms and accept Venezuelans deported from the US, forcing Chevron to pause operations and wind down its activities.

But after intense lobbying, Chevron was granted a new restricted licence by the Department of the Treasury to export Venezuelan crude. That decision was considered to amount to an easing of sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector.

While the precise licence conditions remain unknown, experts said the agreement will bring benefits to Venezuela’s debt-strapped economy as Chevron is expected to send 200,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela to international markets.

Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, said the Trump administration is facing “competing objectives” in Venezuela.

Sabatini told Al Jazeera that the Treasury’s recent move to reinstate Chevron’s (albeit restricted) licence “is a recognition, in part, of the failure of past sanctions” insofar as they ceded control of Venezuelan oil assets from Chevron to “governments opposed to US interests, … China, Russia and Iran”.

He added that “by mobilising this fleet [in the Caribbean], the administration is also trying to scare Maduro into potential regime change.” The upshot, Sabatini said, is that Trump’s two-pronged policy approach “risks causing an unintended conflict with Venezuela”.

How are US relations with the rest of the region?

In talks with leaders from Mexico and Ecuador, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will make the case this week for broad cooperation on migration and drug trafficking, which the Trump administration views as crucial for security across the Americas.

Rubio’s trip on Wednesday and Thursday is likely to be complicated by the fact that Trump has rattled many leaders across the region with sweeping tariffs for not complying with his geopolitical aims, experts said.

The main problem, Sabatini said, is that US “demands are a moving target and prone to the whims of Donald Trump”.

In the case of Brazil, for instance, Trump slapped 50 percent tariffs on the country’s goods in August partly in retaliation for the government’s pursuit of criminal charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally.